CHAPTER 29: DEATHSTALKER
HELMAND PROVINCE, JUST NORTH OF MUSA QALA, SUMMER 2009
The siege had been an impulsive decision. That morning, intelligence indicated that a small troop of British soldiers was abandoning an isolated combat outpost to the north to relocate somewhere nearer Lashkar Gah. Believing the roads clear, they would be travelling in broad daylight, passing unabashedly through humble villages of the valley, the very villages the Taliban had recently secured for its own cause.
Destroy the infidels, came the order, and so they readied their guns and their rockets and their grenades and lay in wait for the convoy of army trucks to wander straight into an ambush.
Everything happened so quickly. One moment, the trucks were trundling along and the village was quiet, serene, quotidian. Karim kept his head down and his back pressed against the dusty concrete wall, just out of sight of the main road. In his hands, he clutched the Kalashnikov assault rifle he had been trained on the year before, when they told him that building computers was sinful and he needed to know what it was to spill blood for their cause. That is, to destroy the enemies of Allah.
But next moment, all was chaos. When the first shots fired, Karim froze. The training hadn't prepared him for the noise of it all, for the heat of exploded air, for the ground shaking his very bones. He reacted like a spooked animal, throwing himself to the ground and shielding his head until the others screamed at him to shoot shoot shoot. And with blood pounding in his ears, he entered the battle. When he ran, his fuel was fear and adrenaline. When he crouched behind a barrier to hide himself, he prayed. And when he fired his weapon, he closed his eyes to pull the trigger, hoping it would all be over quickly.
Bullet hail and rocket fire, screams and eerie silences. Dust and smoke choked the air, and he pulled his scarf up over his nose, but his eyes were streaming and blinded. Stooping low to the ground, he hurried into a deserted building and peered through the square holes serving as windows. How many had they taken out? How many of their own had they lost? Was it finished? Could he flee now, assume victory and return to—
A sudden explosion took out the floor beneath his feet. The building, constructed of concrete blocks and dry mortar, was blasted apart, and Karim fell. He hit the floor of an underground hollow, landing hard, sand and gravel raining down on him, and he flung hands around his head to protect himself. When the sounds of tumbling rock settled, he opened his eyes to darkness. Disoriented, queasy, and in pain from head to foot, he pushed himself up into a seated position and waited for his eyes to adjust to what light was coming through cracks in what was now a cracked and crumbling ceiling above him.
Before they could adjust completely, however, he heard a moan not too far from where he lay, and he opened his mouth to call to his fellows, to ask if they were badly hurt. But before he could utter a sound, a voice muttered words both incomprehensible and strange to the ear. English. Panicking, he scrambled for his weapon, which was half buried, just like he was.
'Move and I shoot!' he declared, and he fixed the gun at the figure that was rising to its feet on the other side of the hollow. Karim tried to move, to stand, but he found his foot trapped beneath a large stone, and a searing pain shot through his leg at the attempt.
The figure spun around, just as surprised as he to find himself sequestered with the enemy. Empty hands flew into the air above his head, and Karim saw that the man did not carry an assault rifle, like he did. Instead, he spotted a pistol at the soldier's side and a knife in his belt. Other than that, the only gear he carried included a heavy pack strapped around his shoulders and a helmet.
It was an easy shot. His vision was sharpening in the dim light, and despite being grounded, he knew he had the upper hand. He could riddle the man with enough bullets to take out a dozen men before he even hit the ground, and he knew he should. This man, this British soldier—he was the enemy. An infidel. It was his moral duty to kill him, and if he didn't, surely he would be the one to die. It would take long for the soldier to go for his weapons, given the chance. But Karim couldn't will his finger to squeeze the trigger. His whole body shook with fear and pain, but the finger was inflexible. He had never killed at close range before, from a place where he could see the shine in the enemy's eyes.
For his part, the man appeared strangely calm. He didn't move, didn't speak, barely blinked, just kept his hands raised and his feet planted.
Karim's eyes raked the crumbling roof. He could see neither stairs nor ladder, and it was too high for him to hoist himself out, even if he weren't injured. And he doubted that the British soldier could manage it either. He didn't look especially tall, not like some of them. Rather small, actually. Neither of them were getting out of there, not without help. If Karim's people arrived first, he couldn't show them a live enemy. And if not Karim's people . . .
It was that simple: If he did not kill this man, he was dead. There were no two ways about it.
Still, he didn't shoot.
Minutes passed. Nothing happened. Once, the British soldier began to lower his hands, but Karim shouted at him, shook the rifle in threat, and the hands came back up. More time dragged by, and the sounds from above were beginning to quiet. What if no one came at all? What if they were all dead or fled, and the only ones left were Karim and an enemy soldier, stuck in a hole in the desert? Karim's eyes, mouth, nose, and beard felt heavy with dust, and his joints and muscles flared with the pain of his position, holding the rifle steady while one leg remained uncomfortably wedged and possibly broken beneath cement debris.
To give himself some relief, he slowly lowered the rifle into his lap, though keeping his finger on the trigger. The man remained still, an acknowledgement that he, Karim, was still in control.
The unseen sun moved slowly across the sky. Karim watched the shadows change.
In one instant, everything changed for Karim and the British soldier. Where he rested his hands in his lap over the rifle, Karim felt a light but noticeable pressure on the back of his left hand in the split second before a fierce pain shot through it. Reflexively, he gasped, dropped his hold on the rifle with the one hand, and shook it violently. But the scorpion, one as long as his thumb and so pale as to appear translucent, landed on his leg instead, and with its venomous tail stabbed him again. He cried out, in fear as much as in pain, and brushed the creature off with his offended hand before crushing it with the butt of his rifle. His eyes welled with tears. The dreaded yellow desert scorpion, one of the most venomous scorpions on the planet, had just stung him—twice—and the pain was already excruciating. One sting, he may have been able to withstand and survive. But two? He was a dead man. It hardly mattered, now, whether he killed the British soldier after all.
He noticed, then, that the soldier had shucked the pack from his back and was rifling through it.
'What are you doing?' he cried. 'What are you doing!'
He tried to lift the rifle and level it again, but with only one good hand, he couldn't bear its weight, and it slumped in his grip, nose pointing into the rubble.
The man said something in his confounded tongue, held up a hand as though to tell him to wait, and seconds later produced a small green box bearing a red cross. It was then that Karim noticed the same symbol on the man's left sleeve. The man was some sort of medic.
Karim stared in amazement as the soldier unclipped his gun and set it aside, then did the same with the knife. Unarmed, and still baring a hand while the other held the box, he slowly came toward Karim. He spoke something else, nodded at Karim's gun, and calmly gestured that it be put aside. His face was open, his voice warm, his stance neither imposing nor intimidating. Slowly, Karim found himself setting the rifle to one side while the British soldier settled himself on the other.
He carried antivenin. Two vials. Antiseptic, cotton balls, syringes, plasters. The soldier took Karim's infected hand and administered to the sting cleanly and efficiently, speaking to him words he didn't understand, but there was a calming quality in his tone and manner, and Karim wasn't afraid anymore. Not of this man. The enemy was saving his life, and . . . Saving his life? It was an incomprehensible thought. As the doctor-soldier worked, Karim stared at him in wonder, memorising the studious pale eyes, the solemn line of his mouth that tended toward a smile when he spoke, and the skilled hands that relieved his pain. Maybe he wasn't a man at all, but a messenger of God.
When he was finished dressing the stings in both hand and leg, the soldier stood to lift the rubble off of Karim's leg, and he treated that as well. He prodded the leg and indicated that it was not broken (somehow, Karim understood), then he cleaned it, wrapped it, and administered painkillers. Then he gave him water to drink before packing his kit and retreating to his place on the other side of the hollow. He didn't retrieve his weapons. Neither did Karim.
Hours more passed in quiet. Karim's hand ached, but dully, and he knew that the antivenin was doing its work. Still, he would need continued treatment, if he ever got out of there. Keeping his distance, the soldier searched for a way out (and Karim let him) but without success. Each maintained a vigilant eye on the other, but any hostility had run dry. At one point, the soldier sat to eat something from his pack, then drink water from his canteen. When he lifted the canteen in a gesture of goodwill and held it out to Karim, Karim hesitated only briefly before accepting, and he drank only enough to slake his thirst before passing it back. He wished there was something he could give the soldier in return.
The light was beginning to orange and darken in the hollow in the earth. Karim, despite his hurts, was feeling sleepy. The soldier was busy stacking rocks and rubble beneath one of the holes in the ceiling, hoping to create a hill tall enough to reach up and pull himself out, though Karim doubted the stability of the upper floor altogether. He wanted to communicate this to the soldier, but he didn't know how.
It was while he was watching the soldier work and contemplate an escape that he heard them—men above, speaking in his own Pashto. The soldier heard it too and backed away quickly from where he might be spotted. Before he could think it through, Karim shouted, 'Hello! Help! I need help!'
'Who is it? Who is there?' The sound of feet above them, voices travelling down through the cracks.
He locked eyes with the British soldier. Then in earnest, he waved him away, back toward the shadows, until he was certain that the man could not be seen. There, the soldier crouched low, making himself as small as possible.
'It is I!' he shouted. 'Karim Omid Niazi!'
'It is Karim,' they said to one another, then shouted back: 'Are you hurt?'
'I am a little hurt, yes.' He rose to his feet and hobbled toward the opening, climbing onto the soldier's steady pile of rocks and looking up. 'But I am alive. Please. Help me out.'
'We're bringing a ladder, Karim. Are you alone? Is there anyone else down there?'
In the dark, Karim caught the eyes of the British soldier one last time, then turned to his fellows. 'I am alone.'
For years, Karim wondered whatever became of the British soldier. The others of his unit were dead or fled, leaving him in inhospitable territory. Chances were, he had not made it out alive. For that, Karim was sorry.
At the risk of being punished for letting one of the enemy live, he never told anyone of what had really happened during his day underground, not until he met another British man, someone who promised to help him escape from the Taliban, from the war and Afghanistan, and start a new life in the British Isles—for a price. And though the years passed, the scorpion scar on his hand never faded. It was his daily reminder of the man who had saved his life.
Karim thought about him often. He didn't know the man's name and could barely remember his face, but for those foreigner-blue eyes, pale as water. He never expected that he would ever see those eyes again, nor hear that voice: calm as a breeze, steady as rocks. The British soldier had become, in his memory, a thing of myth and mystery. And if it weren't for the scar, he might have doubted his memory, or the man's existence at all.
Deathstalker. That's what the English called the desert scorpion. A predator that brings death to its victims. So what did they call one who didn't bring death, but sought it out to destroy it? A doctor, perhaps. But, in his rudimentary understanding of the English language, he thought that deathstalker was a more suitable description. One who stalks death, and defeats it.
So it was that when he saw that man again, five years on, and after five days of terrifying captivity, darkness, and torture, and having been once again delivered from a mortal end, Karim Niazi knew the man was indeed a Messenger sent from God, a man who escaped from dark prisons and outlasted wars, and a man who crushed death in his wake.
Seeing him again, and despite his many hurts, for the first time in what felt like a very long time indeed, Karim was not afraid.
Friday, March 6, 2015
The unnamed man was in intensive care at the hospital in Aylesbury. When they brought him in, he was dehydrated and suffering from exposure to the elements, which was to say nothing of his injuries sustained while being held in captivity or while hanging by his neck from a tree. How many days he had been held, the doctors and police could only speculate, for the man, fully conscious now, wasn't talking. Only when he was in a state of half-delirium did a nurse hear him whispering to himself in what sounded to her to be a foreign language. Arabic, maybe, she said.
While a team of officers continued to comb Newport Cemetery for evidence, snap photographs of Sherlock Holmes' decorated grave, and follow the tracks cut through the snow, Detective Inspector Lestrade, from the waiting room in the ICU wing of the hospital, sent for one of the Yard's most proficient interpreters of Middle Eastern languages.
Meanwhile, in that same hospital, though two floors below, Sherlock and John were being interrogated separately regarding their joint disappearance from the Yard. But neither would talk to Gregson, and Gregson wouldn't let them talk to Lestrade. So he sent in Sally Donovan, who returned to report:
'Their stories match up,' she said. 'Nothing suspicious. I've let them out.'
Gregson stared at her, owl-eyed, and Lestrade hid a smirk. 'You did? Why?'
'Sir, they've done nothing more illegal than trespassing, and I'm not about to arrest them for that. They saved a man's life, for god's sake.'
'Right,' said Gregson, 'when they should have been working with the police, not trying to outrun us. And I'm still not clear on how it is they knew to go to Newport Cemetery to begin with! We need answers, Donovan. We can't be the ones in the dark on this. And you just let them go?'
'They're not going anywhere, sir. They're just as interested in the man they saved as we are, and they're sticking around for answers. Besides, Holmes needs seeing to. He took a hard fall. Walking with a bit of limp himself now. Ankles, is my guess.'
'Those two idiots.' Gregson scrubbed a hand across his face. 'Did they tell you how they knew to go to Newport in the first place?'
Donovan inhaled just slowly enough that Lestrade knew she was going to lie. 'Holmes was working on a hunch.'
'A hunch.' Gregson eyed her sceptically.
'You know how impulsive he can be.'
'Sir, the interpreter just arrived,' Lestrade cut in, gesturing with his phone to indicate he had just got word.
Gregson sighed. 'Fine, good. Donovan, check in with our people still in the field. Lestrade, you're with me.'
They put Sherlock's right foot in a medical boot. He scowled and fussed, and when one of the nurses suggested he might want to think about a crutch to ease some of the pressure off the foot, he snapped at her that he didn't need a damn crutch and returned to the waiting room where John sat alone with a stack of untouched magazines, his own cane lying across the central coffee table. Sherlock did his best not to hobble or look bothered, but John crooked an eyebrow.
'No fun, is it?' said John gently.
'It's fine. It's temporary.' He winced and shook his head. 'Yours is too.'
'Sure.'
'Any word from . . . ?'
'No. Sit down. Worst you can do to a fracture is keep applying unnecessary pressure, boot or no boot.'
It was an empty room, but Sherlock took the chair right beside John, letting out a groan of pain as he eased down into it.
'Foot's not the only thing hurting, is it?'
Sherlock straightened out his face to erase the wince-lines. 'No, but they got me pumped full of painkillers, so there's that.' He threw a devil-may-care sort of smile to the side. 'Besides, this fall wasn't nearly as bad as the last one.'
John looked away.
'I meant . . .' If Sherlock could have kicked himself in the head with this own booted foot, he would have. 'The fall from the tracks. That's what I meant.'
John tried to laugh, to show he understood his misinterpretation and wasn't bothered, but it was insincere and short-lived. So he made to change the subject instead. 'Well. All told, then, it was a good day.' He sat straighter in the chair. 'No one died.'
'That's what we're calling a good day now, is it?'
'It's an improvement. They didn't get this one. That man is going to live.'
'John.' Sherlock shifted in his seat, the better to face him. 'Who is he?'
'I don't know his name.'
'But you recognised him. I saw that plainly. And he knew you.'
John let out a shaky breath. 'Yeah.'
'From Afghanistan?'
John rubbed his leg and nodded. 'Feels like a long time ago now. Another man's life.' He frowned, and he licked his dried lips worriedly. 'Is it possible that it's only a coincidence? That they chose a man who I once . . . I mean, how could they even know? All the others have been strangers. Jefferies, O'Harris, all of them. Even Ewan Nichols, who you knew, seemed like a coincidence of naming.'
'I don't trust that any of this is coincidental. It has all been carefully planned and executed, even though tonight, those plans failed. As you said, the man lived. But they must know that you and he once knew each other.'
'It wasn't like that.'
'Tell me.'
John raised his eyes, and they held one another's gaze for a long time, both feeling the immensity of that gap, the unspoken history of a time before they had ever met and new lives had begun. Other men's lives indeed. Even back then, before the fall, John had spoken very little of Afghanistan and the war, and Sherlock had never inquired. What he did know, he had deduced or supposed, based on the evidences of John's evasive speech, ineradicable mannerisms, and, more recently, revealing dreams. But it wasn't enough. He realised that now. Now, he was overflowing with questions, questions that should have been asked and answered years before, and maybe would have been, had he but broached the topic. Or maybe not. Whenever the subject arose, however innocently, John always steered him away. Sherlock wondered if he would now.
'He called you deathstalker,' said Sherlock, a gentle prod.
'He didn't mean . . .' John flexed his left hand and adjusted himself in the chair. 'Ah hell. Damn thing won't let me forget any of it.' He smiled tightly, just lips; his eyes were dimmed. At last, he cleared his throat.
But at that moment, Lestrade and Gregson rounded the corner and stepped into the waiting room. John and Sherlock rose to their feet now, however unsteady those feet were; between the two of them, they had one good leg, and it wasn't Sherlock's. Before Lestrade could insert a buffer comment, Gregson said, 'Mr Holmes, a word, if you please.'
Lestrade's shoulders fell in a sigh, and he gestured for John to join him in the hallway, leaving the chief superintendent and consulting detective to themselves in the waiting room.
'Please, take a seat,' said Gregson, gesturing.
In any other condition, Sherlock would have made silent protest and stood rigid and defiant. As it was, he was grateful for the chance to sit back down, but he made himself as rigid and defiant in the chair as possible.
'I'll make this short,' Gregson said, sitting across from him. 'What you and Dr Watson did tonight, running off like that, was foolhardy and dangerous. You had your reasons, I know, and frankly, you knew things we didn't, somehow, and if you hadn't gone off . . . well, let's just say it. We may have lost another one. So I can hardly begrudge you taking action. What am I trying to say? Look, Mr Holmes. I know you don't trust me. God knows you have every reason, what with Pitts being who he was, Stubbins' duplicity, and all those others, and the way our boys down at the Yard have treated you and Dr Watson . . . I get it. I do. And I'm not likely to change your opinion of me in a night or a fortnight or month of Sundays. But it's my job to protect the citizens of London, and that includes you and Watson both. So I don't care whether you like me or trust me or any of that—I still mean to do my job. So I'm sending you home. Lestrade will take you, because I know you trust him, and we'll set up a security detail on your flat, just to be safe.'
'No, chief.'
'Pardon?'
'I said no. John and I are not going home. Not yet. In these last thirty seconds, two things have become very clear to me.'
'Oh? What might those be?'
'One: You are not a turncoat.'
'Oh. Well then, cheers. I didn't think I was. And two?'
'Were you aware, Mr Gregson, that someone was listening in on every word we spoke tonight in the conference room at the Yard?'
Gregson's eyes narrowed. 'Who?'
'Quite possibly, Sebastian Moran. At least, I believe it was Moran. Could have been someone working for him, but I tend to doubt that.'
'Moran was last spotted in Belarus.'
'He's back.'
'Hold on—how do you know this? How was he listening in?'
'Go back to the Yard and look for a bug in the phone. It might be planted elsewhere—under the table, on a chair, in a laptop—but my guess is, it's in the phone, and if I were a betting man I would put money on it. Did a technology specialist set up the room?'
'Yes, they always—'
'Find out which. On that note, no security detail. If they can get into the Yard, they can get into the flat. Set up cameras if you must, outside only, but no one goes into the flat.'
Meanwhile, as they waited, Lestrade and John walked slowly side by side down the hallway.
'He's not saying much,' Lestrade said, not hesitating to fill him in on what the police had learnt. 'We believe he is from Afghanistan, though. Nurse said she thought she heard him speaking Arabic, so we brought in our interpreter, who spoke to him for a little while and discovered that he's fluent in three Middle Eastern languages: Pashto, is his native tongue, Dari and Arabic are second. English is pretty poor though.'
John nodded. He would have guessed as much.
'He's obviously wary of police. Chances are, he's here illegally and fears deportation. We told him we're not with immigration, that we want to help him, and arrest those who hurt him, but he's won't answer our questions. Won't even tell us his name. He's going to be all right, physically, but he's traumatised. Of course he is.'
'Let me speak with him,' said John.
Lestrade controlled a wince. 'Probably not a good idea. He's hurt, but more than that, he's scared, John. They may have threatened him, warned him to keep quiet or else.'
'You don't threaten a man you're planning to kill,' said John. 'Not like that. There's no point. Look, I believe he'll talk with me. We . . . share a history.'
Lestrade stopped walking. Hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, he stared at his feet and thought.
John pressed him. 'This one survived, Greg. He wasn't supposed to. And he'll have seen their faces, he'll know where they kept him. We need to know what he knows. He may not want to talk to police, but to me? If anyone knows what that man has just gone through, I do.'
'The red tape . . .'
'I'm still a consultant, remember? You've not revoked my clearance.'
'Technically, that's true.'
Seeing Lestrade was on the cusp or relenting, John acted as though it were a decision already made. 'I'll need an interpreter, of course.'
'If I agree to this—if Gregson and I agree—we'll of course send our man with you.'
'No, not him.' John took a deep breath. 'There are things I may need to say . . . things I can't'—he swallowed, wondering why every time, every time, this was so damn difficult—'I can't say certain things in front of a stranger.'
'Our man's a professional. He has a code of confidentiality. When all is said and done, it will be like he wasn't even in the room.'
'I can't, Greg.'
'Then who—?'
'You said the man is fluent in Arabic.'
'Yes.'
'So is Sherlock.'
'Sherlock? Since when?'
'He picked it up during his sixteen months in the Libyan prison.'
Lestrade blinked in surprise. 'The what now?'
'Oh. Sorry, I figured he'd told you about that one.'
'Jesus Christ.'
'He may not be a trained interpreter, but he's the only person . . .' He looked down at the floor, feeling his eyes tingling and throat thickening. He swallowed it down, blinked rapidly, and tried again. 'He's exactly who I need.'
The backlash to John's plan was both sensible and predictable, but Lestrade argued on his behalf anyway, displaying confidence in John's reasoning he had not demonstrated to John himself. But that was Lestrade's way—though reticent and circumspect, once he was converted to an idea, he defended it with vigour.
That's how, twenty minutes later, Gregson, Lestrade, John, and Sherlock could be found walking two by two toward intensive care. Strangely, it was only Sherlock, now, voicing any misgivings.
'My Arabic is rudimentary at best,' he said to John out of the corner of his mouth. He was hardly going to say no, not when he would get a chance to hear this man's story for himself, and surely not when John himself asked it of him. But he claimed no confidence in himself.
'You think anything less than masterful to be rudimentary,' John retorted, displaying not a hint of concern.
Not that Sherlock didn't appreciated John's faith in him, but in this particular instance, he thought it misplaced. It had not been an exceeding amount of time since his last verbal exchanges in Cairo, but it felt like a lifetime had since passed. Clunking along in his plastic boot, he fell backwards in time, struggling to resurrect the miserable man from that wretched life and to recall the placement of the tongue, the shape of the lips, the taste of the language. With effort, bread-and-butter lexical items arose in his mind to be slotted into familiar but unnatural grammatical constructions.
Before the double doors leading into intensive care stood a tall counter, behind which sat a nurse at a desk. Seeing them approach and recognising the officers, she arose and placed a plastic box on top of the counter. 'Phones, please,' she said. 'And sign your names to the ledger.'
'Hospital policy,' said Lestrade, and both he and Gregson surrendered their mobiles. Sherlock and John followed suit, signing their names below Lestrade's and Gregson's.
Gregson dismissed the two officers standing guard at the doors, telling them to take a thirty-minute break. Then, once inside, the chief superintendent handed John a manila folder and gestured to the back of the long room. 'He's down at the end,' he said. 'And remember, he's hurt and he's scared, but the sooner we get his statement, the quicker our chances of tracking these guys down.'
'I'd like to be able to promise him protection,' said John. 'If he knows he's not going to be deported, he'll be more likely to open up.'
'The police don't have the power to make those promises,' said Gregson. 'But I know people at Home Office. I'll talk to them, tell them the situation. They can help him apply for asylum.'
'Thank you.'
'We'll wait here,' said Lestrade.
The only privacy provided to the man at the end of the room was a thin blue curtain, which John slowly parted. Behind him, Sherlock peered over the top of his head and saw the man in the hospital bed, reclined forty-five degrees, and a nurse replacing an IV bag. The man looked over, and when he saw John, his dark eyes brightened and he gasped. The nurse jumped a little and turned.
'Sorry,' said John. 'I'm . . . My name is Dr Watson. My colleague, Mr Holmes. We're with the police. We need to speak with this man, if you could give us a moment.'
The man looked anxious, eager, and he shifted himself up in the bed, wincing as unspoken pain flared up at this movement.
'Of course, doctor,' said the nurse, excusing herself.
John and Sherlock stepped past the curtain, and Sherlock drew it closed. Then he watched with interest as John stepped to the man's side and drew up a rolling stool.
'As-salaam alaikum,' John said tentatively.
'Wa alaikum assalaam,' the man replied, his voice scratching. Sherlock noted the gauze gently wrapped around the man's neck, hiding the bruising and abrasions from the rope. Then the man coughed.
John poured water from a plastic pitcher into a clear cup and extended it to the man. 'I imagine you're thirsty.'
'I . . . thank you,' said the man. He moved to accept the water, but his hands trembled and couldn't hold it, so John assisted, placing the rim at his lips and holding the back of his head, tipping water into his mouth in increments. The man swallowed loudly, but even as he drank, he couldn't pull his eyes away from the one who proffered it. Meanwhile, Sherlock catalogued his visible head wounds and chaffed wrists. 'You are saved me.' He said, once he had had his fill. 'You are saved me . . . two'—he held up to fingers—'two . . .'
Two times, Sherlock supplied in his head. He practised translating it into Arabic.
Touching his chest, John said, 'My name is John.'
The man tried it out: 'John.'
'And this is my friend. Sherlock Holmes. He's going to interpret for me. Sherlock?'
Sherlock nodded, and in his best Arabic, he said, 'John needs to ask you some questions, and he has asked me to interpret.'
From the corner of his eye, he noticed John looking at him in unabashed wonder. Though John had always known that he had some skill with languages, he had seldom heard Sherlock speak them. Sherlock found the open admiration bolstering.
The man looked between them. In his own tongue, he said, 'You are police?'
Sherlock translated.
'We are helping the police,' John said. 'They are looking for the people who attacked you, but they need your help.' When a look of fear entered the man's eyes and he shook his head, John continued, 'And they promise your protection. They will make sure you stay safe.' There was no reply, just uncertainty. 'Will you tell us your name?'
But the man didn't answer. With urgency in his voice and desperation in his eyes, he reached for John, saying, 'You remember me? Do you know my face?' He sought out John's arm to pull him closer. 'It was dark, and many years have passed, but do you remember?'
John waited for Sherlock to finish translating, but before he could, the man let go of John and twisted his hand around for John to see. 'Do you see? The scar? Here is where the . . .'
Encountering the unfamiliar word, Sherlock fumbled on the translation. 'Uh,' he said, listening hard as the man continued on in earnest, and he struggled to catch up; the translation became paraphrase. 'He says he was stung, something poisonous. You fixed him up.'
'I do remember you,' said John. He took the man's hand and examined the scar with hands Sherlock knew to be the hands of a healer. 'And the deathstalker.' He looked to Sherlock. 'It's a kind of Middle Eastern scorpion.'
Sherlock nodded and pathetically mimed a stinger. But the man smiled, eyes beginning to glisten. He provided the word in Arabic: 'Akrab.' Sherlock nodded, understanding, and said to him, 'He remembers the scorpion.'
'You saved my life.'
'And you saved mine.'
'Tonight. You saved my life again. I believed I was a dead man, the moment they took me. I believed I was dead. But you . . . you . . .' He began to tremble, lips, hands, shoulders.
'It's all right, sir, you're safe now,' said John by way of Sherlock. 'Can you tell me your name?'
Tears slipped down the man's cheeks and into his beard as he answered. 'Karim. Karim Omid Niazi.'
'I'm pleased to meet you properly, Karim. Though I am sorry it is not under better circumstances.'
Wiping at his face with hands wrapped in bandaging, Karim Niazi tried to straighten out his face, clearly embarrassed by his emotional display.
'Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?'
'I cannot help you, sayyid. I am sorry. I know nothing.'
'Anything at all you remember could be helpful. If you could only confirm the identification of those who attacked you,' said John, and he opened the manila folder, withdrawing an enlarged photograph of Darren Hirsch; Sherlock noticed that John studiously avoided looking directly at the photograph himself.
Seeing what John was doing, Karim Niazi sat more rigidly in the bed. 'Waqafa,' he said under his breath, and before Sherlock could translate his plea for John to stop, he put out a hand as though to block the photograph the photograph from his sight. 'I am a bad man. I know this. A very bad man. I am being punished for the things I have done. I hurt women and children, and Allah sent a scorpion. I abandoned my people for the West, and Allah sent . . .' His throat constricted, and he sobbed once and covered his eyes.
'No, Karim—' John began.
'But you, sayyid. He sends me you, too. Are you His angel?'
John shifted uncomfortably in the chair, holding his cane between his legs. Karim Niazi's eyes lowered to where John's grip had tightened on the handle.
'But you are hurt. From the war? From when I left you?'
Silence followed, and for a moment, Sherlock thought John hadn't even heard him, or that he did not wish to answer. Perhaps, he thought, he should explain to Karim that John wouldn't be talking about himself tonight and to please not ask personal questions again. Then John said, 'The same men who hurt you—they hurt me, too.'
Karim frowned and looked at Sherlock, as though accusing him of a false interpretation.
'They've hurt a lot of people. Most of them have died.'
'Not you, sayyid. John. They didn't do to you what they did to me. They wouldn't . . . not you . . . That man, he— he—' He looked away, distressed and ashamed.
John closed the folder and set it aside. 'Did one of those men . . . ?' He was having difficulty saying it, and just as Sherlock was on the cusp of offering to spare him the utterance and translate what was implied, John said, 'Did he molest you?'
Sherlock scrolled quickly through his acquired vocabulary, coming first upon words like nag and bother and trouble. Wrong sense, wrong meaning. At last, he settled on a word akin to trespass or infringe. But Karim seemed to gather the sense of what he was being asked. His lips pursed in an effort to keep them from trembling.
'Because that's what he did to me,' said John. His left hand clenched in his lap; the other gripped the cane. He cleared his throat, lifted his chin, and looked Karim in the eye. Then he took a stuttering breath before saying, softly but clearly, 'I was raped.'
Dutifully, Sherlock's lips parted to translate—finding a word that meant violate or invade—but as he formed John's own words and heard them stutter from his own mouth, he felt an ache, raw and real, squeezing the blood from his heart, pressing the air from his lungs, as if the act of uttering those words, even in a foreign tongue, was an act of claiming the experience he had no business claiming. He wanted to reach out to John, touch him, feel him, and somehow reify their presence in that hospital room, not in underground prisons. There they stood on their own two feet, shaken but breathing, battered but whole, and not yet defeated. He wanted to reassure them both.
'Nine times,' John said, quieter still, 'that I recall.'
Sherlock's voice caught on the number. He couldn't speak. John lifted his head to him. Gently, as though to comfort Sherlock, he said, 'You don't need to translate that last part.' And Sherlock knew John had been able to voice it at last only because, in that private space, when his words could be spoken by two mouths and shared in two lives, he could.
Witnessing the solemn but tender exchange, Karim said, addressing Sherlock, 'You. You are his friend?'
And rather than translate the question, Sherlock responded affirmatively in Arabic, 'I am his friend. I am also a detective. I am going to find the men who hurt him, and you. It is they who will be punished. Not you.'
Karim nodded and wiped away fresh tears. 'Please. Ask me your questions.'
'He's ready to see the photograph,' Sherlock told John, and John nodded, opening the manila folder once more and turning the picture for Karim to see.
'Is this the man who attacked you?' he asked.
'I never saw his face,' Karim said. 'But I'll tell you what I know.'
There had been others, Karim Niazi said—men who had grabbed him off the street, men who assisted in getting him up the tree. But during the five days he had been held in captivity, there had been only one: Darren Hirsch, the Slash Man.
For five days, he had been held in a small, lightless room and fed through a slot in the door: packets of crisps, tinned peaches, and bottled water. He didn't know why he had been kidnapped, why he was being held prisoner, nor what would happen to him in the end. But no one spoke to him. No one touched him. All he heard from his captor was a whistling in the dark, a sweet and sorrowful tune he couldn't name but now would never forget. Then, on the fifth day, that giant of man returned, his face cast in shadow. He had opened the door, pulled Karim out of the cupboard, and abused him in ways too terrible to detail. Just the once. Then came the noose.
He couldn't identify the other men. He did not recognise the photograph of Sebastian Moran.
And he couldn't say where he'd been. There were no windows, and the floor had been made of packed earth. While in the cupboard, he could hear pipes and smell damp. Outside the cupboard, in the light of a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, he briefly saw that the walls, too, were made of packed earth with random holes large enough for . . .
'Wine bottles,' Sherlock told Lestrade and Gregson, after. 'He was kept in a cellar, probably in the country near Buckinghamshire. He says the ride from London in the back of the van lasted for hours, but his perception of time was likely skewed owing to a heightened state of anxiety. I estimate he was kept somewhere in the vicinity of Newport Cemetery, probably in a country home where the nearest neighbours could neither hear screams nor see suspicious comings and goings. His head was bagged going in and out of the house, but he's given a description of the van, so it's a place to start.'
By the time Lestrade returned Sherlock and John to Baker Street, it had gone two in the morning. He showed them where the cameras had been set up across the road and in the back alley to monitor all possible entrances and exits. Then he left them to return to his own home.
Exhausted from the day's events, they readied for sleep in silence, intent on reaching their beds as quickly as possible. Or rather, for Sherlock to find his and for John the sofa. Sherlock did notice how John's eyes lingered a moment on the staircase leading to the second storey, and he suspected that John was contemplating reclaiming his bed, something he still had not done during the midnight hours since his return. But in the end, he situated the pillows and lay down on the sofa, drawing blanket up around him.
'We can still switch bedrooms,' said Sherlock, reviving an old argument. 'If you prefer this floor. Fewer stairs. Closer to the bathroom. Frankly more comfortable.'
'Go to bed, Sherlock,' said John, eyes already closing, body only seconds away from sinking into sleep.
Sherlock retreated then, eager to put all the cemeteries more comfortably into yesterday. He should have known, he should have anticipated, that as greatly as they were wearing on his own mind—the flowers, the chase, the man hanging from a tree—they were wearing on John's. Perhaps he thought that John's daytime calm would somehow translate into night-time restfulness. But he fell asleep quickly without considering that there would be another nightmare.
Nevertheless, his body was now trained to respond.
The noise startled him into consciousness. An odd thumping, rattling glass, and splitting wood sounded from the sitting room. A newly forged habit, his body awoke before his mind did. He tossed aside the blankets and hurried from his bedroom, one foot bare, the other booted and pounding along. He halted just as soon as he came within view of John on his feet at the windows, prying away the long wooden boards with his bare hands. They were not giving easily.
'John?'
When he didn't answer, only kept yanking on the edge of a board with an intensity of focus, Sherlock knew he was sleepwalking. He approached cautiously.
The board came loose and clattered to the floor, just missing John's socked feet. Immediately, he started tugging at the next.
Sherlock had long mastered that first impulse—to seize him and pull him away from the window—but he knew he needed to re-secure the wooden board. At the same time, he had to be delicate.
'John,' he said conversationally, 'what are you doing?'
'She needs to see,' John explained, voice husky with sleep. He clawed at the space between boards, trying to get a better grip. Sherlock saw that his fingers were splinter-scratched and red.
She could mean so many people, but in John's dreams, there was usually only one.
'Do you mean Mary?' he asked.
'Mary's dead, Sherlock,' said John sharply.
'I know,' he replied. 'John, come over here. We'll worry about the windows in the morning.'
'But she can't see us.'
'Who?'
'Mrs Hudson.' Another board clattered atop the first.
Sherlock was standing at John's side now. He peered through the window and onto the damp street, cast in orange streetlights. The street was empty. 'Mrs Hudson is not down there, John. She's living with her niece. For now. She's safe there. But she'll come home soon, I promise.'
But as ever, John was encased in a world with a logic all its own. 'She'll see the names on the grave. She won't understand. She needs to see us. If she can't see us, she'll never find her way home. Agh!'
The board, loose on one side and secured on the other, snapped back against the wall, trapping John's finger between two lengths of wood. He pulled it free, but not without crying out, 'Lestrade!'
Sherlock jumped back a little at the shout. John bent at the waist, cradling his offended finger close to his stomach, face twisted in pain. 'What happened, where are you?' Sherlock asked urgently.
'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I had to fess up, they were going to break them all!'
His fingers. It was when they had broken his fingers. That's all it had taken—one minute, John was in 221B, anxious about Mrs Hudson's prolonged absence and addressing Sherlock by name; the next, at one flash of pain, he was back in the basement of the convent, and Sherlock was dead.
Keeping his hand tucked close to his body, John extended the other to keep Sherlock at bay. 'I'm sorry, Greg. They know about you now. Please, just stay away, keep back, or they'll hurt you, too.' He was edging along the windowed wall as though searching for an exit, but instead he came to the corner where the wall met the bookshelves and knocked against a standing lamp. It teetered dangerously but didn't fall.
'It's all right, John.' At the sound of his voice, John stilled. 'Lestrade isn't here. He's safe. Do you know where you are?'
'A basement kitchen. I don't know where. No one can find me here.'
'That's not true,' Sherlock said forcefully. 'Someone did find you. You're not there anymore. You're at home. Baker Street. With me.' He wanted so desperately to break down those barriers in John's subconscious that so easily convinced him he had never really left the convent. It wasn't enough to do so in the daylight. He needed to prove it in the darkness. He just didn't know how. 'Do you know who I am?' he asked next.
John shook his head and answered breathlessly. 'You sound like someone I once knew.'
'I'm Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes.'
'But he's—'
'Not dead. He's—I'm alive. I know it feels like it, for both of us, but I was never dead. I'm right here, John, and I'm not going anywhere ever again. Do you understand?'
Rather than look convinced, John appeared perplexed. He kept cricking his neck to one side, as though trying to remember something important or wake himself from a deep sleep, but he could manage neither. Sherlock sighed, weary but compassionate. 'Come sit down. I'll look at your finger.'
John didn't move, not until Sherlock took his elbow to guide him to his armchair and lower him into it. Then, sitting across from him on the edge of his own chair, Sherlock took his hands, examined them perfunctorily, and said, 'See, it's not so bad. It'll heal quickly.'
'Did Pete break them all?' John asked; his eyes were glazed over, staring sightlessly at the rug between his knees.
'Not a one. You just banged it up a bit. But I'm not going to get you ice for it until you wake up.'
'. . . Am I sleeping?'
'You're sleeping, John. But you don't have to be asleep anymore. It's time to wake up now.'
With more calming words, Sherlock coaxed him awake and watched as the light slowly returned to John's eyes. He blinked rapidly, his breathing changed, and his head lifted. When his eyes cleared, they focused on Sherlock's. His fists tightened into balls in Sherlock's hands.
'What happened?' he asked, startled to find himself upright in his chair. He glanced over to the sofa where his blankets were piled on the floor. Then he saw the light from the streetlamps pushing past the windows where there was a large gap in the boards. Returning to look at Sherlock, he said, 'I was sleepwalking again, wasn't I?'
Sherlock nodded slowly. So John knew after all. But he didn't seem upset so much as embarrassed. 'Yes,' said Sherlock. 'It wasn't so bad.'
'Did I . . . say anything?'
'What do you remember?'
'Pete. He was . . .' He pulled one hand away from Sherlock and splayed his fingers as though to verify that they were whole. The trapped finger was slightly red, probably throbbing, but minimally damaged. 'Moran was laughing.' He let out a shaky breath and readjusted to grip Sherlock's hands while looking away. 'Do I do this kind of thing a lot?'
'No,' said Sherlock. He shrugged and said casually, 'One day in every five-point-four.'
John laughed now, to hide his embarrassment, but he couldn't sustain it. 'Shit,' he said. 'And here I thought I was, you know, getting better.'
'Of course you are. You get better every day. You must see that. What you did tonight—you couldn't have done that a month ago. Ordinary people, they couldn't do what you did even on their best days. You're extraordinary, John.'
Unconvinced, John shook his head slowly from side to side. 'But look at me. I couldn't handle it after all, could I? Everything went right tonight, as right as it could go, and I'm still dying in my dreams.'
'Fighting,' Sherlock amended. He pressed his thumbs into John's palms, a reassuring squeeze. 'From what I've observed, you're always fighting. Because that's what John Watson does.'
Sally Donovan pounded on the door with the heel of her hand. When it didn't open within three seconds, she pounded again.
'Oi, give a man a break,' said Thomas Dryers, blinking out at her through the crack in the door. 'It's only half five in the morning.' When he made out who stood on his stoop, he added, 'Bloody hell,' and let the door yawn wider, expecting her to charge across the threshold.
Instead, she chucked the small key to his ankle monitor at him from where she stood. 'Take it off,' she said. 'And get dressed. You're needed down at the Yard.' Then she turned on a heel and began to stride away.
'Hang on!' he shouted, stepping one bare foot out into the cold while trying to keep the other leg inside where it was warm. She sighed and turned, and the glare she gave him dared him to continue. He dared. 'So what is this?'
'Your sick leave is expired. Get back to work.'
He grinned. 'I passed the Sally Donovan test, did I?'
Her jaw was set tighter than a vice. She spun around and began to stalk away. 'Sally!' he called after her, but it was obvious she would not be turning back. Having exhausted all other avenues, Thomas Dryers had been her number one suspect and last lead. But following that, too, had led her only to a dead end. She no longer knew where to look.
.
.
.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Outside, the bells of St Paul's called the faithful to midnight Mass. Inside the Two Stone Giants, a live band tried to drown them out with electrical guitars and violins, drums and keyboard, and vocals to scare the hair off a cat. Edward Stallman sat alone and hunched at the bar, already on his third lager. Violet would kill him when he got home. First would come the icy silence, but given enough time to stoke the ire, that ice would crack. Explode. He heard her voice scraping the insides of his ears already. It's Christmas, Eddie, it's Christmas! she would say, and The children, Eddie, the children! As if the day of year or doe-eyed five-year-old twins had any bearing on money lenders or court repossession orders. The-powers-that-be were already skimming plenty from his monthly wages, and they were threatening to send bailiffs next to collect his possessions. Before long, he'd lose the flat. Then what would they do? Christmas or no Christmas, children or no children, he and Violet would be on the streets and the kids would be in the care of the state.
Nothing he did, nothing he could do, would stop it. So tonight, with the twenty quid he'd won off Ingalls wagering on a game of snooker, he was going to sit right here and drink.
At the stroke of midnight, an old man with a white beard slid into the vacant seat next to him and gave him a nod. 'Happy sodding Christmas, mate,' said Eddie, returning the nod; his speech slurred only a little. 'May your days be merry and all that rubbish.'
'A merry Christmas to you, too,' said the stranger. Then, to the barman, 'Another lager for my new friend, and one for me.'
'Cheers,' said Eddie, finishing off his glass to await the next.
'Nowhere to be tonight?'
'Nowhere I care to be. You?'
'Right where I mean to be.'
They chuckled together, the two strangers. When the lagers came, they both drank long and deep, and Eddie, pleased with the newfound company, extended a hand. 'Edward. Ed, Eddie, Ediot, whatever you like,' he said.
'Nice to meet you, Eddie.' Pissed as he was already, Eddie Stallman didn't notice that the man didn't offer his own name in return. 'And a nice place to warm the blood, I reckon.'
'Pfff. The misses'll have my blood tonight, that's for sure. Might as well keep it warm for her.'
'A hard-won bird, is she?'
'You might say that.' He took a long drink. 'But I gotta credit her some. It's not easy being married to a down-and-out dickend.'
'Oh, I'm sure you're being too hard on yourself, Eddie. What's it you do?'
'I'm a caretaker. Glorified mop-pusher and bin-emptier, that's what I am. Impressed?'
'And where do you care-take?'
'New Scotland-fucking-Yard. You'd think London's finest'd pay a man who's been on the job fifteen years a touch more than the boy who sweeps out the corner shop.' He shrugged. 'You'd be wrong.'
'Rough times.'
'Shit times.'
'What would you say to making a little extra then, eh, Eddie?' asked the stranger. 'Put a little padding in the bank?'
'I'd say Father Christmas must have put me on the nice list by mistake.' He chortled into his drink and sucked the liquid noisily into his mouth. 'Still. It'd make for a nice change.'
'Ten thousand pounds can change a lot of things.'
Eddie Stallman stopped sucking and slowly lowered the nonic glass back down to the counter.
'You would only have to do one thing. One very small thing.'
'For ten thousand pounds?'
'For ten thousand pounds.'
'Are you having me on?'
'Do you want to find out?'
Eddie shook his head and laughed again. 'You're having me on.' He threw back the rest of the glass.
'You work at New Scotland Yard. You push mops and empty bins. You probably dust and hoover and scrub urinals, too, am I right? You work a shift that ends at eleven at night, and you're often the only living soul on the third floor when you're finishing up. It's steady work, but thing is, you're in debt up to your eyeballs. Not a happy place to be. But ten thousand pounds . . .' He shrugged and lifted his glass. 'Could make a difference.' He drank.
'Who are you?'
'Tell me you're interested, and we'll keep talking.'
'I'm interested. Holy hell, yes, I'm interested. What do I have to do?'
'Easiest thing in the world, Eddie.' The stranger reached for the inside pocket of his jacket. He placed a small silver key on the bar and slid it over. 'In three days, Friday night, half an hour before your shift is over, you're going to unlock the drawer of a desk on the third floor and walk away. Return in thirty minutes, lock it back up, and go home.'
'That's all?'
'That's all. Drop the key in the sewer. Go home. If you do that and only that, you'll wake up in the new year with ten thousand pounds credited to your bank account.'
'And this isn't a trick? Because if I'm found messing with any property belonging to the Yard—'
'Not a trick. Only one catch: you tell someone, anyone, and the money disappears. Ten thousand quid, gone, and then some.'
'Who would I tell?'
'Then we have a deal?'
'Hell yeah.' Eddie laughed again, raised his glass to the barman indicating his need for another, and wiped a hand across his mouth. 'You are Father Christmas.' The barman set another glass in front of him. 'So? Which desk is it?'
'Desk of a woman named Sally Donovan.'
Friday, December 26, 2014
'It's simple,' said the black-haired stranger to George Yarrow, a newly hired caretaker at the Yard. 'Tomorrow night, you'll leave your duties on the second floor at precisely 10.35. Take the stairs. Walk to the corner desk with the nameplate Sally Donovan on, and open the drawer. It won't be locked. Inside, you'll find a set of three keys. Press each one into this pad of putty so it leaves a distinct mark. Put the keys back, exactly as you found them. Close the drawer, and go back to work. Leave the tin of putty in the men's loo, third stall. Someone will pick it up.'
'That's all?'
'That's all.'
'And if I do this,' said George Yarrow, 'you'll pay me five grand.'
'Someone will. But only if you never speak of it again.'
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Randall Kensington didn't ask questions. They (whoever they meant) weren't paying him two thousand pounds to ask questions. He strolled into the hardware shop and up to the counter.
'Can you make a key from an imprint?' he asked, pulling out a flat square tin filled with hard putty. He lifted the lid and showed the imprints.
'Sure,' said the man behind the counter. 'Have 'er ready in an hour or so.'
'I'll be back.'
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
The face of Mitch Jenkins' wristwatch read 22.42 and his sweaty fingers pinched the keys in his pocket. It was now or never, and if he meant to pay back his brother-in-law the money he owed plus interest without either of their wives ever knowing, it was now.
He rounded the corner and slipped behind the desk that blocked the door to the evidence lockers. Easiest thing in the world, he repeated in his head. Easy money. He removed a disposable tissue and placed it on the door handle and tested. It was locked, just as it should be. Then he tested the first of the three keys. It didn't budge. But the second did. The clipping of the lock seemed to fill the entire room.
But Jenkins didn't open the door. That wasn't his job. He just left it. He would return in twenty minutes to lock it again, before dropping the keys in a far-away sewer. Easy money.
Heidi Ringwald didn't know what was in the boxes. It wasn't her job to know. Her job was to maintain the midnight cafeteria so that Yarders working through the night could have a hot cup of leek soup or an egg salad that wasn't twelve-hours old. That, and memorise three simple numbers—catalogue numbers—so when she found herself in that little room on a floor she never visited, she would be able to find the corresponding boxes on the appropriate shelves, zip them into her unassuming and oversized tote bag, and slip out of the room and back to the cafeteria where she would stow the bag in the walk-in refrigerator. And it was that job, that one-off easy-money job, that would ensure that her teen daughters could continue attending the London Ballet Academy and see their dreams come true.
Trusting that the boxes would be gone next she checked, Heidi Ringwald left the bag where she had promised and returned to the other ladies, to whom she had said she was only going to the loo. Her heart was still pounding as she pulled a batch of Chorley cakes from the oven, twenty minutes later.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
In the morning, three small parcels of varying size, dimension, and weight, all wrapped in brown paper and addressed to three different Royal Mail PO Boxes outside of London, left three separate outboxes in three different departments on three different floors, only to find themselves all together again in the mail room at New Scotland Yard, part of the outgoing mail.
The mail coming into the Yard was x-rayed, subjected to black light, and tested for anthrax.
The mail going out underwent no inspections whatsoever.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
'So let me get this straight,' said June Zalud. 'I walk into the shop, buy a big ol' bottle of sodium hypochlorite—'
'The size is irrelevant.'
'—pay for it in cash, and leave it at the'—she made air quotes—'drop site, and you give me two hundred quid.'
'That's right.'
'Why am I doing this?'
The twenty-something white boy shrugged. 'I dunno. All I know is, I'm getting paid an awful lot to get you to do it.'
'Yeah? Who asked you?'
'She didn't give me her name. But she was sexy as hell.'
June Zalud laughed at the stranger. 'You lot are so predictable. Fine. Two hundred pounds is worth it to me, even if she promised you five hundred and you're planning to pocket the rest. Sodium hypochlorite, is it? I don't even know what the hell that is.'
The kid shrugged in return. 'They use it in swimming pools, apparently.'
Friday, January 16, 2015
The text from a blocked number came in at 9.42 in the morning:
Lunch is cancelled.
It was code, one Sean Lawrence had been nervously anticipating for more than a week. Today was the day.
As the IT specialist responsible for technology in the briefing rooms, he had been specially chosen. As an adult male with a sex-club habit to fund, he had been in no position to turn down the proffered twelve thousand pounds. So he had been tasked with upsetting the technology just before the briefing so they would have to call him in to fix it. Then, as per his venal contract, while he fiddled with cables and desktop applications on the pretence of correcting the technical difficulty, he was to activate a hidden camera that he had already installed: while the room was watching the images projected on a screen, the camera would be watching the room.
His last job, when it was all over, would be to dismantle and destroy the camera, and never to tell anyone, especially anyone at the Yard, what he, a simple IT guy with bottom-level security clearance, had done.
Monday, February 16, 2015
They scrabbled beneath the bridge and deposited their bounty into a central pile. On their knees in the huddled ring, they pawed through the coat pockets and dumped the contents of the wallet, filching notes and cards and shoving them into their own trouser pockets. The woman was already exchanging her shoes for the ones she had claimed at the riverbank.
'Shit, Ellie, you know they're too big fer your goddamn feet.'
'I'll stuff'm with newspaper and they'll suit me fine,' she returned with a sneer.
One of them was exchanging a length of rope tied around his waist with the black leather belt, and another man was looping the dark-blue scarf around his neck, chortling to himself. Another still was slipping the suit coat over the denim jacket he already wore. No one noticed or cared that one among them, the tallest and strongest, had taken the keys, empty wallet, and phone. But when he grabbed the Belfast coat and stood up, someone grabbed the hem and held on.
'Oi, mate, just where do you think you're going with that?'
'This one's mine.'
'Like hell.'
'Yeah, who says you get the coat?' said another.
'I do.' And with that, he smashed a boot in the grasping man's face, turned, and ran into the night, the coat bundled in his arms like baby.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Strictly speaking, Cyrus Coggins wasn't supposed to talk about the details of his work. It was something to do with 'respecting the privacy of the offenders' or some such twaddle, which had never made any sense to him. After all, those men (sometimes women, but let's get real here) were public offenders publicly convicted, and now they deserved privacy?
But get a few drinks in him, and Coggins' mouth became a well-greased gossip engine.
'Tell it again, Cy. Lowell was taking a shit. Tell us again 'bout the snowballs.'
Coggins drained another glass. 'Two days,' he said, looking around bleary-eyed at the boys of the pub. He leant on an elbow and held up two fingers as a prop. 'Two days, and the pampered prat has already been able to wheedle his way into cosy indoor work. Probably never done a day's labour his whole coddled-n-cushy life, know what I mean? Man's fin'lly gonna learn what it is, working so hard your crotch sweats buckets and your pits run like rivers, feelin' that deep-muscle ache from an honest days' work, man's work.' He snorted into his glass. 'Bloke prob'ly goes home and soaks in bubble bath.'
'The snowballs, Cy!'
'Right, so get this.' Half the pub was listening in, amused by the stories Coggins had been relating about the convicted Sherlock Holmes for the last forty minutes, everything from how ridiculous he looked in the reflective orange jacket to how he had tried to hide his phone that first day and not turn it over, resulting in a necessary and rather intimate pat-down. 'So I've got the boys working in Battersea Park this afternoon, right?'
He continued his tale with all the flourishes and embellishments necessary to get the boys laughing—he did love a receptive audience—and built steadily toward the moment he saw the kids scooping ice and slush into their hands. He had known what would happen, knew exactly what, but he had wanted to see it anyway.
'Smacked right here,' he indicated with a hand, 'in the back of the neck. Good aim. And you know what he does? Nothing. Man's a robot. It's like he didn't even feel the first one. Or the second. Third one, though. Whoof, right in the schnozz. Knew then I should, you know, call the kids off.' He chuckled noisily, phlegm sticking in his throat. The others laughed with him. 'Tomorrow'll be the same, god help me. I tells ya, ain't no place in the city he won't be hounded, and it's me what's gotta deal with it.'
'Know what you could do?' said one of the pub boys, a fella who'd been there from the start.
'Yeah, what's that?'
'Cousin of mine got into some trouble a while back up in Yorkshire. Community sentence, fine, all that. And they made him scrub headstones and mow lawns in a cemetery. Quiet, private. It was summer then, but surely there's winter work, just the same. Seein's how this winter ain't never gonna end.'
'Cemetery, eh?' said Coggins. He scratched his chin.
'Sure, a cemetery like Camberwell. Big ol' place, that. I'm sure there'd be plenty work to do.' The man lifted a glass, gave a wink, and said, 'Cheers.' Then he drank it down.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Eva Almaraz wasn't supposed to leave the desk unattended, not for anything. So when the phone rang and she heard the code words spoken by a digitised voice through the receiver—St Camillus de Lellis is on leave—she hesitated. She drummed her fingers. She stood up, and sat back down. She swivelled nervously in her chair. She eyed the hospital security camera hanging above her head, wondering if it had been turned off, as promised.
Finally, as she set her watch, she reasoned with herself: the patients were safe. There were two officers of the law just beyond those doors, after all. She would be gone only seven minutes. Not much could go wrong in only seven minutes. And in the end, she really did need three thousand pounds.
For now, the hallway was empty. Eva hit the timer on her watch and stepped away on the pretence of going to the loo.
When she returned, seven minutes later, everything looked exactly the same. She was left to wonder if anyone had been there at all.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
They were calling it one of the longest, coldest winters London had seen since the Big Freeze of 1963, although this one hadn't quite broken any records. It was March, a month when temperatures should have been climbing, but another winter storm was on its way.
Because they were no longer inviting anyone to the flat, not even the delivery boy for Thai takeaway, Sherlock stepped out onto Baker Street at about seven o'clock to fetch that night's supper. A strong sweep of wind, mixed with snow, nearly stole the flat cap right off his head. The elementary disguise, just to throw off those who followed the news closely enough to recognise his curly head, was hardly needed, however. The streets were well deserted; sensible people were staying in tonight.
The nearest Thai places would no longer serve him, and he wouldn't deign to eat low-quality Thai, so he took an eastbound bus for a ten-minute ride to the Lotus Thai Restaurant on Cleveland Street. If he timed it right, he could be on the westbound bus within five minutes of drop-off and be back in the flat with his gai yang and John's pad khing still hot.
It was as he was disembarking, however, that his mobile sounded. He hurried to stand with his back against a building for some protection from the wind before pulling the phone from his pocket and reading the text:
The boys found something
you're going to want to see.
How fast can you get to the
City Mill River near High
Street?
GL
Sherlock pulled a glove off with his teeth, the better to type.
Forty minutes by bus.
SH
Take a cab. Hurry.
GL
Sherlock could practically feel Lestrade's urgency through the phone, and he felt the contagion ignite the blood in his veins. Knowing the wind would interfere with the sound quality of a phone call, he shot a rapid text off to John:
Lestrade's found something.
He wants me to go to City
Mill River. Can you come?
While he waited for the response, he breathed hot air onto his hands and looked circumspectly up and down the street, trying to spot the taxis. Here and there, a solitary car, but no bodies to be seen. The snow was slowly accumulating on the ground, a single layer, fine as dust.
You go. I'd like a night in.
Sherlock stepped into the street and hailed a taxi.
City Mill River near High
Street. Get here quick as you
can.
GL
All day, Donovan had been trying to track down a transit van that matched Karim Niazi's description, but with little success. On top of the unresolved issue of infiltration and the incident with Dryers, she was feeling the sting of incompetence and self-doubt. Lately, she had begun to question her own judgement, second-guess her every move, and dwell on her failures of the week, large and small. So when she returned home at night to her empty flat, she didn't pass through the mechanical routine of readying for bed but sat on the sofa and stared at a muted TV, turning the case over and over again, wishing she had someone with whom she could talk it through, until exhaustion took her and she fell asleep across the cushions without so much as a blanket before a new day began too early and called her back into the field. She needed a break in the case. She needed a break. But she would never ask for one.
But now, it seemed as though the break in the case had happened elsewhere.
On my way.
Lestrade sat alone in a small café, a stone's throw from New Scotland Yard, reviewing for the twentieth time Niazi's testimony. Sherlock and John had been thorough in their interview, with which even Gregson was pleased. On a separate pad of legal paper, he made notes, comprised of new details, old patterns, and unresolved questions.
He was deep in thought when a sudden text shook him back to himself. His phone was at his elbow: incoming text from Sherlock.
I need your help.
SH
His heart skipped a beat, and his fingers flew to respond.
What happened? Are you
all right?
GL
Fine. But you need to come
here right now. City Mill
River. Just you.
SH
I'll be there in twenty minutes.
GL
He stacked his notes, tucked them under his arm, and threw a fiver on the table before hurrying out the door.